World Wide Web Consortium

The WWW Consortium, in English: World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), is an international consortium that generates recommendations and standards that ensure the growth of the World Wide Web in the long term.

This consortium was created in October 1994, and is led by Tim Berners-Lee, the original creator of the URL (Uniform Resource Locator), HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol, HyperText Transfer Protocol) and HTML (HyperText Markup Language), which are the main technologies on which the Web is based.

W3C Organization

The W3C was created on October 1, 1994, by Tim Berners-Lee at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the consortium's current headquarters. Later they join, in April 1995, INRIA in France as the European host, which was replaced by ERCIM in 2003, and in September 1995, Keiō University (Shonan Fujisawa Campus) in Japan as the Asian host. These bodies administer the W3C, which is made up of:

• Members: As of April 2010, there were 330 members.
• Equipment (W3C Team): 65 researchers and experts from around the world.
• Offices (W3C Offices): regional centres established in Germany and Austria (joint office), Australia, Benelux (joint office), China, South Korea, Spain, Finland, Greece, Hong Kong, Hungary, India, Israel, Italy, Morocco, Sweden and the United Kingdom and Ireland (joint office).

The Spanish office of the W3C, established in 2003, is housed by the CTIC Foundation in the Gijón Science and Technology Park (Principality of Asturias).

Maturation of specifications

Sometimes when a specification gets too big, it is split into independent modules that can mature at their own pace. Subsequent editions of a module or specification are known as levels and are denoted by the first integer in the title (eg CSS3 = Level 3). Subsequent revisions at each level are indicated by an integer after a decimal point (eg CSS2.1 = Revision 1).

The W3C standard formation process is defined in the W3C process document, which presents four levels of maturity through which each new standard or recommendation must progress.

Working Draft (WD)

After enough content has been compiled by the 'draft editor' and discussion, it can be published as a Working Draft (WD) for community review. A WD document is the first form of a standard that is publicly available. Comments from virtually anyone are welcome, though no promises are made to act on any particular item commented on.

At this stage, the document model may have significant differences from its final form. As such, anyone implementing WD standards must be willing to significantly modify their implementations as the standard matures.

Candidate Recommendation (CR)

A candidate recommendation (in English: Candidate recommendation) is a version of a standard that is more mature than the WD. At this point, the group responsible for the standard is convinced that the standard meets its objective. The purpose of the CR is to get help from the development community regarding the implementation of the standard.

The standard document may change further, but at this time, it was decided on mostly significant features. The design of these features may still change due to developer feedback as the standard matures.

Proposed Recommendation (PR)

A proposed recommendation (in English: Proposed recommendation) is the version of a standard that has passed the previous two levels. Users of the rule provide input. At this stage, the document is submitted to the W3C Advisory Council for final approval.

While this step is important, it rarely causes significant changes to a standard as it moves to the next phase.

Both candidates and proposals can enter "last call" to indicate any additional information that should be taken into account.

W3C Recommendation (REC)

A W3C recommendation (in English: W3C recommendation) is the most mature stage of development. To this point, the standard has undergone extensive review and testing, both in theoretical and practical conditions. The standard is endorsed by the W3C, indicating its readiness for public deployment, and fostering more widespread support among implementers and authors.

Recommendations can sometimes be implemented incorrectly, in part, or not at all, but many standards define two or more levels of conformance that developers must follow if they want to label their product as W3C compliant.

Later revisions

A recommendation may be updated or expanded separately with published errata or editor non-technical drafts, until enough substantive changes accumulate to produce a new edition or level of the recommendation. In addition, the W3C publishes various types of briefing notes to be used as references.

Certification

Unlike ISOC and other international standards bodies, W3C does not have a certification program. The W3C has decided, for now, that it is not appropriate to start such a program, due to the risk of creating more harm to the community than good.

Criticism

In 2012 and 2013, the W3C began considering including some Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) for DRM in HTML5, which has been criticized for being against neutrality and interoperability, which distinguishes sites built using only W3C standards not including proprietary plugins like Flash.

Standards

Standards published by the W3C/IETF (on the Internet protocol suite):